Dream Chorale

This is a piece in g minor for flute, piano, and drum set with lots of unusual/spooky chords and a fast middle section in Eb major.
I composed it in my high school Music Technology class in fall 2006 using
the Sibelius notation software.

Explanation

Here is the explanation I wrote for class. You might find it interesting or insightful.

I chose to write my piece for flute and piano because that would give me enough instruments to do something interesting and my brother and I could play the piece together. My inspiration was the second movement of Ravel’s Sonatina, which I had recently learned to play. I had composed two pieces last year, a rather somber chorale in c# minor and a piece in 3/4 time that I called “Dance and Variations”, but this year I wanted to write something more mysterious using unusual and dreamy chords. I think I succeeded.

I also decided to write a theme that I could use several times, as in a baroque piece. Of course, I started on the second beat of the measure. My theme was D E F# G Bb-C-D. When I was experimenting with ways to harmonize the second measure, I happened on a major seventh chord and decided I liked it, so I kept it as my first unusual chord. In the first section, I went from g minor to F major and Bb major and then ran short of ideas. I did not want to end up switching back and forth between the same relative majors and minors. Chopin did that in many of his Mazurkas; it is effective at first but gets boring as the piece goes on.

I showed the piece so far to my piano teacher, who suggested that I enter Eb major and also complained that the piano part was not interesting enough. In response, I added a contrasting middle section, giving the right hand of the piano triplets the entire way through; he thought this was overboard, but I liked it. In the first eight measures of the middle section, I aimed for a pleasant but idiosyncratic sound and achieved the latter with some mismatching A naturals. I am especially proud of the second half of measure 35. Following those eight measures, I used an unusual diminished third (Eb->C#) and repeated almost the same melody, harmonizing it differently to make it sound spooky.

I took another idea from baroque music and decided to build up to a "four-way stop”, after which the theme would return. My four-way stop was a half cadence from an augmented sixth chord (Eb-G-Bb-C#) into the dominant, D major. When I wrote the percussion, I noticed that a cymbal splash sounded (at least to me) like a secondary dominant for a cymbal crash, so I used the splash and crash sounds accordingly; I wonder if an entire theory of percussion cadences could be worked out similarly.

In the recapitulation, I used mostly the same melody as in the very beginning but split it between the flute and the right hand of the piano. In places, I put those two voices in canon, which my piano teacher especially liked. I also emphasized the phrasing of the melody from the second beat of a measure through the first of the following measure. Probably the most difficult part was writing the final cadence into g minor. I tried and tried again, but I had trouble getting two independent, interesting melody voices to resolve properly into a g minor chord. Eventually I had the idea to build in a switched-around version of the theme, which worked very well: Bb-C-D D E F# G.

I am proud to add this composition to the “portfolio” I stared last year with my c# minor chorale and “Dance and Variations”. I was at a loss for a title that pinpointed what I had tried to accomplish, although I knew I wanted “Dream” in it. At first I titled the piece “Contrapuntal Dream”, which nicely suggested that I took some ideas from baroque music, but my piece did not turn out so contrapuntal. Finally I settled on “Dream Chorale”.